A culture-inspired approach to gaining insights for designing sustainable practices

This paper explores a design method to generate insights for designing less resource-intensive forms of everyday life. This study takes the assumption that looking at cultural diversity can widen the variety of insights which can be used as a source of inspiration for designing sustainable practices. However, there is a lack of clear-cut approaches for collecting information on sustainable everyday practices from multiple cultures. Therefore, this study explores: 1) how to collect information about resource-consuming everyday practice from different cultures, and 2) what kinds of insights can be gained from this information. An experimental culture survey was conducted. The survey had the practice ‘bathing’ as the central topic, and featured three countries; the Netherlands, Japan and India. The results suggest that a self-observation probe with a feature of recording the practice by a set of elements was successful in collecting information from users in three countries. From this information, three types of insights were generated, which are expected to be useful in the context of designing sustainable practices. These are: 1) different styles of bathing and their respective resource consumption, 2) relations between the contextual elements and 3) particular actions which have a considerable impact on the total resource consumption.